The Integrity of Carmans Low Tide on Grand
Pré

By Tracy Ware

Although most critics agree that Bliss Carmans
first book contains many of his best poems, little attention has been paid to the
integrity of Low Tide on Grand Pré: A Book of Lyrics. Carmans prefatory
note to the volume, however, calls attention to his care in ordering its contents:

The poems in this volume have been collected with reference to their
similarity of tone. They are variations on a single theme, more or less aptly suggested by
the title, Low Tide on Grand Pré. It seemed better to bring together between the
same covers only those pieces of work which I happened to be in the same key, rather than
to publish a larger book of more uncertain aim. 1

Carman was aware that this method of publication ran the risk of
monotony, but he consistently followed it (with varying success) because it gives
the volume a unity and an artistic completeness (I hope) that it could hardly have had
otherwise.2 This article will suggest
that Carmans prefatory note is misleading only in its modesty. After a close
examination of the keynote title poem, I shall argue that the unity of Low Tide on
Grand Pré is due to more than a similarity of tone: there is a definite
progression apparent in the volume, and Carmans strategies of arrangement allow him
to adopt a striking variety of lyric stances.

I

In Desmond Paceys opinion, Low Tide on Grand
Pré is the most nearly perfect single poem to come out of Canada. It
will withstand any amount of critical scrutiny.3
In the time since the appearance of Paceys reappraisal of Carman in
the 1950 volume of Northern Review, however, Carmans poem has received some
praise but little scrutiny. Two exceptions to this critical trend are Tom Marshall and
John Robert Sorfleet. Marshall notes that Low Tide on Grand Pré is a return
poem4; as such, it finds a place in the tradition
that extends from Wordsworths Tintern Abbey through Roberts
The Tantramar Revisited to such modern poems as Glasscos
Luces Notch and Purdys The Country North of
Belleville. Sorfleet places the poem in the contexts of mysticism and of
Carmans career:

Fundamental to any understanding of Carmans work and thought is
an awareness of the seminal experience incorporated in Low Tide on Grand Pré.
This work, from which Carman dated his career, embodies a moment of revelation which so
strongly impressed itself on Carmans mind that he still recalled it forty years
later in his second last poem, Forever and Forever.5

Written in June, 1886, and first published in the Atlantic Monthly
in March, 1887, six years before its eponymous inclusion in Carmans first volume,
Low Tide on Grand Pré gives eloquent testimony to Carmans great talent,
however sporadically that talent would be realized in his prolific career.

Low Tide on Grand Pré is
addressed to an imagined interlocutor, who is analogous to Dorothy Wordsworth in
Tintern Abbey. The identity of Carmans interlocutor is left unspecified;
we know only that this person, in the past, shared the mystical experience with the
speaker, and we may assume that this person is the beloved who is now So
long from home and Acadie (Carman, p. 16). Although critics have argued that the
poem refers to the death of a beloved woman, nothing in the poem indicates that such is
necessarily the case. It is reasonable enough, in view of the poems passionate tone,
to see the interlocutor as a woman, but her absence does not automatically imply her
death. It is still less reasonable to join those critics who, incapable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason, to borrow Keats words, attempt to guess her identity. Of the various
guesses, Paceys is the most acceptable, because it is presented as a mere
biographical detail. Pacey points to Julie Plante, Carmans lover until 1886. Less
acceptable is John Nauses suggestion that Carmans poem describes a
clandestine and illicit romance. Most eccentric of all is Donald
Stephens opinion that the poem refers to the death of Carmans mother.6 What is of interest here, however, is that, while
Low Tide on Grand Pré does not necessarily refer to the death of a beloved,
the poems following it in the volume do explicitly involve such a death. Evidently some
critics have tacitly and casually followed Carmans prefatory remarks on the unity of
his book. This article will pursue the implications of those remarks in a more systematic
manner.

The sun goes down, and over all
These barren reaches by the tide
Such unelusive glories fall,
I almost dream they yet will bide
Until the coming of the tide.
(Carman, p. 15)

This landscape is a subjective correlative of the mood
created by Carman in the poem. A sunset in itself might cause melancholy intimations of
mortality, but the poems first line, being innocent of adjectives and adverbs, does
not go much beyond mundane description. It is in the use of the adjective
barren in the second line that the landscape becomes figurative of the
speakers projected depression. On the reaches, the mud flats surrounding
the river, fall the unelusive glories of the sun; the adjective
unelusive is a curiously effective (if ungrammatical) coinage that stresses
the apparent accessibility of the numinous, while the word glories recalls
Wordsworths memory of nature having The glory and the freshness of a
dream.7 In the following two lines,
however, the speaker realizes that the unelusive glories are as impermanent as
all other natural objects. He can almost dream that the sunset
will last until the coming of the tide, but he knows that the
will of nature is not his will. He knows also that the privileged moments of
glory are as transitory as the tide or the sunset. Two distinct orders of time are
established here: the epiphanic and the linear. The problem of integrating these two
orders is central to Carmans poetry and to the return poem.

In the second stanza, the
rhetorical turn evident in the conjunctive phrase And yet indicates the
speakers attempt to recall his previous projection:

And yet I know that not for us,
By any ecstasy of dream,
He lingers to keep luminous
A little while the grievous stream,
Which frets, uncomforted of dream 
(Carman, p. 15)

No matter how nature may appear to us in the
ecstasy of dream, he argues, it has a purpose that is not for us,
and that exists independently of our perception of it. Yet even when he expresses this
sense of the separation of the human and the natural, he personifies the sun (He
lingers), thereby endowing it with volition. The speaker knows that his imaginative
projections are potentially delusive, but he is unable to see nature as devoid of human
significance. Although he knows that, unlike man, nature is uncomforted of
dream, he continues to view nature in anthropomorphic terms, calling the stream
grievous and adding that it frets. The former adjective is
repeated in the next stanza, where the projections continue:

A grievous stream, that to and fro
Athrough the fields of Acadie
Goes wandering, as if to know
Why one beloved face should be
So long from home and Acadie.8

Midway through the stanza, the sceptical comparison
introduced by as if shows that the speaker realizes that his perceptions
contain a degree of projection, but the persisting personifications (grievous,
wandering) imply that this degree is irreducibly present in all perception.
The anthropomorphism of language prevents us from ever seeing nature as it exists in
itself, and hence the opening stanzas of Low Tide on Grand Pré reveal as much
about the speaker as they reveal about nature. Carmans stanza form is well-suited to
this dual subject: the ababb rhyme scheme, with its repeated end-words in the second and
fifth lines, and the hesitant tetrameter lines, reflect both the vacillations of the
speakers mind and the fluctuations of the tidal waters.

At this point a moment might be
taken to move from these opening stanzas to Carmans position on the issues involved.
As an idealist in the related traditions of Romanticism and Transcendentalism, Carman was
not so sceptical of the revelations provided by nature as this discussion might have
implied. His speaker in Low Tide on Grand Pré is to some extent an ironic
one, though ironic is an unsatisfactory word in this context. It is better to
regard that speaker as a nascent version of Carman: the speaker simply describes the
mystical experience that became the basis for Carmans philosophy. Other and later
poems in this volume and elsewhere give that philosophy a fuller expression. Commenting on
Carmans development of a coherent and consistent philosophy, Sorfleet
notes in Low Tide on Grand Pré an intense awareness of the
psycho-emotional revelation that is mystical experience, as compared to the
experientially-based (though metaphorically-couched) resolution of spiritual
doubt in such later poems as Pulvis et Umbra.9 The depressed mood of the speaker in Low Tide on Grand
Pré prevents him from achieving such resolution; part of the fascination of the
poem, however, is that, as Sorfleet implies, Carmans subsequent position is implicit
in it. As indicated in a letter of 1892, Carman does not believe that he who perceives
divine significance in nature is a victim of his own wayward imagination:

I would wish always to indicate the personal effect of Natural beauty
on myself, never for a moment supposing that the effect was intentional on the part of any
Great Being called Nature. And yet, no! I would feel a personal communion at times; but I
would feel quite sure that my own distracted grief awoke no grief in that great heart.10

Believing in the possibility of a personal
communion with a divine force in nature, Carman insists that the great
heart of this divinity is benevolent but not so personal as to respond to the grief
of the individual. He stresses that communion is possible only at times, at
the rare moments of privileged perception. His idealism is subjective to the extent that
it depends on the personal effect of Natural beauty on the imagination of the
poet. Like a good Transcendentalist, he maintains that nature and art are both metaphors
of the soul of man: Art, if you care to say so, is all made of metaphors,  is
itself the universal metaphor of the soul. And who shall prove that nature is not a
metaphor, too?11 Accordingly, his poetry
follows Coleridges dictum and seeks to make the external internal, the
internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature.12

In the fourth stanza of
Low Tide on Grand Pré, the speaker remembers his experience of a
personal communion. Here nature is neither a simile nor a projection  it is a
symbol in the full Coleridgean sense, a manifestation of the translucence of the
Eternal through and in the Temporal13.

Was it a year or lives ago
We took the grasses in our hands,
And caught the summer flying low
Over the waving meadow lands,
And held it there between our hands?
(Carman, p. 16)

Pacey points to the waving rhythm of the
stanza, and to the disciplined simplicity of statement that requires only one
adjective, waving, to describe the effect of the wind on the Fundy marsh
grasses.14 For all its simplicity, the stanza
establishes the second of the two orders of time that are crucial to the poem: the
timelessness of the mystical moment. The speakers question casts no doubt on the
validity of his mystical experience. Instead, his question testifies to the sadness that
settled on him after his inevitable descent to the mundane world of linear time. The
mystical moment gave the speaker a revelation of the eternal world, but such an
experience, as Sorfleet notes, cannot be induced again at will.15 The events of a year ago now seem like lives ago, as
if the very sense of a unique individual life were now rendered problematic. The
transience of time is stressed by the comparison of the summer with the flight of a bird,
a comparison that may derive from the following lines from Fitzgeralds
Rubaiyat: The Bird of Time has but a little way/To flutter  and
the Bird is on the Wing.16 In any event,
the comparison has the effect of making an abstraction (time) graspable and concrete as
well as stressing the transience of the season. Against the fleeting moment the speaker
can strive only by turning to his memory, and from memory to a proper reading of the
divine traces, the unelusive glories, in the present landscape. Lacking
both the rites and the dogma by which the integration of the sacred and the secular orders
of time is ordinarily achieved,17 the
speakers sole resources are his memory and his imagination.

The speaker remembers
especially the effect of the twilight on the river at our feet (Carman, p.
16). This phrase may be an appropriate echo of Wordsworths account of a similar
memory in the Immortality Ode: The Pansy at my feet/Doth the same tale
repeat:/Whither is fled the visionary gleam? (Wordsworth, 11. 54-56). In both poems
a specific aspect of nature is perceived in radically different ways at different times,
emphasizing the psychological change in the speaker. The stream that resembled
running gold (Carman, p. 16) in the past is identical to the one now perceived
as grievous. In the past, the couple launched their enchanted boat in the
gleam, (a Wordsworthian and Tennysonian word expressive of transience); in the
present, the speaker stands disconsolate on the reaches. Other contrasts follow. They
include the intensity of the past experience, conveyed in the synesthetic phrase
twilight scented fine like musk (Carman, p. 17), versus the speakers
present spiritual torpor, and the past communion versus the present isolation. There may
be a sexual basis for that sense of communion, as Nause argues, but the poem is
deliberately vague on this point, for the communion is of a spiritual order, involving the
union of soul and soul (Carman, p. 17).

One of these contrasts
necessitates a qualification of the scheme of two orders of time that this discussion has
abstracted from the poem. The speakers sense of stillness in the past contrasts with
the pain of his return to temporal and spatial flux. The Fundy waters become a metaphor of
the wheeling of the years (Carman, p. 17). Clearly we should distinguish the
cyclical time of the natural seasons from, on the one hand, the linear time of the mundane
world, and, on the other hand, the timelessness of the mystical moment. Christopher
Salvesons discussion of time in Wordsworth is apposite: the workings of
memory, while making him aware of time, also lead him out of time  out of the linear
flux of human life into the continuous repetitions of Nature, or, more absolutely, into a
mystical calm.18 For both Carman and
Wordsworth the way out of linear time is through the cyclical time of nature, and the way
out of cyclical time is through memory and imagination. Nowhere in Low Tide on Grand
Pré does the speaker realize that memory offers a form of transcendence, but such a
realization is implicit in his ability to relive his past experience.

The seventh stanza is crucial
to any interpretation of the poem. For Pacey, it is the weakest stanza in the poem,
basically because it is relatively vague and abstract.19 Pacey admits the mystical nature of the stanza,
without realizing that, because precision and specificity can never be the virtues of
mystical poetry, the stanza is necessarily vague, though greatly suggestive:

And that we took into our hands
Spirit of life or subtler thing 
Breathed on us there, and loosed the bands
Of death, and taught us, whispering,
The secret of some wonder-thing.
(Carman, p. 17)

Typically, the young Carman does not connect his sense
of the numinous with any orthodoxy, but his attitude towards the numinous is not a
sceptical one. If there is doubt here, it is the kind in which faith can live. Like
Wordsworth and Shelley, Carman is sceptical of the minds ability to comprehend the
things it may apprehend. The object of the experience is left unspecified as Spirit
of life or subtler thing, but its incorporeal existence is assured. While the
spiritual truth of the experience still resists formulation, since it is The secret
of some wonder-thing, its effect on subsequent cognition is undeniable. We know only
that the experience loosed the bands/Of death, and we may assume that it did
so by revealing, or intimating, spiritual truths that transcend death, and therefore
remove the fear from death. The phrase we took into our hands, a variant
repetition of two lines from the fourth stanza, sets up the melancholy conclusion of the
poem, in which the cause of the experience is incapable of being grasped again. This
incapability does not necessarily make the experience a delusion, although Pacey and Nause
argue that it does. For Pacey the past experience is a romantic illusion. For
Nause, stanza seven grows logically out of the vain delusion which precedes it, and
leads inevitably to the culmination of the delusion in stanzas eight and nine.20 Not only do such interpretations attribute to the
poem an improbably severe irony, they also make Carmans doubts into certainties, and
Low Tide on Grand Pré into a palinode for the poetry that Carman would
continue to write for the next forty years.

Similarly, Pacey and Nause
interpret the remainder of the poem in terms of their preconceived identification of
mysticism with delusion. Nause is at least specific in his comments on the eighth stanza.
There, addressing his beloved, the speaker remembers her mystical transfiguration21:

Then all your face grew light, and seemed
To hold the shadow of the sun;
The evening faltered, and I deemed
That time was ripe, and years had done
Their wheeling underneath the sun.
(Carman, p. 17)

The verb seemed, Nause argues, emphasizes
the illusory nature of the experience, and the verb deemed means
intemperate judgment.22
Unfortunately, the O.E.D. supplies no authority for the second of those interpretations.
It is better to regard the stanza as expressive of contradictions clearly established
earlier in the poem. Again we have a transient moment, as is vividly registered in the
reference to the shadow of the sun. Again the speakers mistake is to
believe in the permanence of this moment, and to confuse a personal revelation of eternity
with the imminent end of time itself, when the years will have done their
wheeling.

The futility of this desire to
move immediately and permanently from the temporal to the timeless world is evident in the
ninth stanza:

So all desire and all regret,
And fear and memory, were naught;
One to remember or forget
The keen delight our hands had caught;
Morrow and yesterday were naught.
(Carman, p. 18)

Here Carman alludes to the opening of Rossettis
sonnet, The One Hope:

When vain desire at last and vain regret
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
And teach the unforgetful to forget?23

Carmans allusion will acquire resonance later in
the volume, when he states that his one hope involves eventual reunion with
the beloved after death. According to William Michael Rossetti, such a reunion was also
the basis of his brothers one hope. In Low Tide on Grand
Pré, however, the speaker is still beseiged with vain desires. The abstractions
listed in the ninth stanza  desire, regret, fear, memory, delight, and temporality
(Morrow and yesterday)  are all operative in the present, making it all
too obvious that they were not annihilated by the mystical moment. As Sorfleet notes,
all desire and all regret vanished at that moment because mysticism involves
the abandonment of egocentric desires and feelings in a movement from the
familiar ego to the transcendental or real I.24 In later poems in the volume, Carman is able to integrate these
two subjects by moving from memory to meditation.

Pacey notes that the ninth
stanza completes the pattern of the inset memory, then argues that the tenth
and concluding stanza bursts the bubble of romantic illusion. 25 In addition to the objections already advanced to
this position, it should be added that if Carman were concerned merely to dispel a naive
illusion, then his final presentation of the speakers grief would surely be
immoderate. In order to discover a reason for the speakers lament, Pacey, Nause, and
other critics go outside the text of the poem to refer the grief to the death of the
beloved. There is really no need to oppose the grief to the mysticism. Willard L.
Sperrys comment on Wordsworth is equally applicable to Carman: He was a
mystic, and therefore liable to his meed of that accidie which mysticism promises
its exemplars.26 It is this accidie,
this spiritual dejection, that shapes the Fundy landscape into a final and, for the
speaker, unconscious pathetic fallacy:

The night has fallen, and the tide. . . .Now and again comes drifting home, Across these aching barrens wideA sigh like driven wind or foam:In grief the flood is bursting home.(Carman, p. 18)

When first published in The Atlantic Monthly,
this stanza, like the third and ninth stanzas, originally ended with an exclamation mark,
which Carman subsequently recognized to be superfluous. This concluding stanza completes
the poem in two ways not realized by Stephens, who writes that to end the way
[Carman] does is dramatic, and has a nice poetic quality, but what does it really say
thematically?27 In the first place, the
stanza returns to the problems of the present, thus giving a structural integrity to this
return poem by completing its symbolic geography. Low Tide on Grand Pré
begins in the present on the barren reaches (Carman, p. 15), where the
prospect of the tides becomes an image of temporal flux. From there the speaker remembers
a spot of time that occurred by a drowsy inland meadow stream
(Carman, p. 16), a still and benign landscape. The poem concludes with a return to the
opening setting, and to the linear order of time. In the second place, the ultimate irony
of the poem is that the speakers grief, involved as it is with temporality, is no
more permanent than the symbolic night, which will inevitably lead to a dawn. That last
detail is not fortuitous. Low Tide on Grand Pré depicts the onset of a dark
night of the soul, but it does so in terms of a prior illumination. Of this poem we may
say what A.C. Bradley has said of Shelleys similar lyrics: clearly the lament
which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the evanescence of its visitations or the
desolation of its absence, is indirectly an expression of the ideal.28 The relation of Low Tide on Grand Pré
to Carmans ideal would be even clearer if he had written his planned companion
piece, High Tide on the Bay of Fundy.29

II

Additional support for the present interpretation of
Low Tide on Grand Pré may be gained by an investigation of the structural
integrity of the volume that it opens. Earlier critics, such as Harry W. Brown and Duncan
Campbell Scott, recognized in the volume a unity that has not been examined in detail. 30 Central to that unity is the quality described by
the reviewer in The Week, who praises Carmans remarkable power of
association whereby the present object brings back the memories and scenes of the
past.31 The volume itself, then, is to an
extent Wordsworthian, for the association of past and present is fundamental to
Wordsworths technique. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Carmans visionary
consolations occur despite the present landscape, as he repeatedly builds his hopes on
memories and anticipations: in Scotts words, the volume is given over to the
spirit of unrest, to the longing that looks before and after and pines for what is
not.32 The mysticism of the title
poem involves a most un-Wordsworthian desire to annihilate memory and time. That
annihilation cannot be finally effected, but the very desire for it reveals the distance
between Carmans return poem and Tintern Abbey. This distance decreases
in subsequent poems in the volume, some of which achieve a more Wordsworthian consolation.

Now there are at least four
valid objections to any attempt to find unity in a Carman volume. The first is that the
various poems have invariably been published separately over a period of a few years. To
this it may be replied that Carmans careful arrangement can nonetheless be
revealing. The second objection is that Carmans habitual repetitiveness ensures a
modicum of unity in any volume of his work. Against this it is argued that the integrity
of Low Tide on Grand Pré is based not on monotony but on what Coleridge called
multeity in unity. The third objection is that the search for unity in any volume tends to
be self-confirming. From this the critics best defence is vigilant awareness. The
fourth and final objection is that Carmans architectonic power is limited, as is
amply shown by The Pipes of Pan. To this it is replied that Carmans sense
of structure is less limited than is generally assumed.

The three poems after the title
poem all continue its elegiac mood, to which they give varying and dignified expression in
the context of specific deaths. In the next poem, A Windflower, the elegiac
mood reaches its nadir:

To-night can bring no healing now;
The calm of yesternight is gone;
Surely the wind is but the wind,
And I a broken waif thereon.
(Carman, p. 28)

A shift occurs with In Lyric Season, where the coming of
spring evokes an old unrest in the speaker (Carman, p. 30). The last two
stanzas offer the volumes first explicit consolation, the promise of an afterlife:

I know I shall not ever meet
Thy still regard across the year,
And yet I know thou wilt draw near,
When the last hour of pain and loss

Drifts out to slumber, and the deeps
Of nightfall feel Gods hand unbar
His lyric April, star by star,
And the lost twilight land reveal.
(Carman, p. 30)

As Sorfleet notes, in this poem, and in other poems in
the volume, absolute beauty is symbolized by the personification of
Nature as a beautiful woman.33 One effect
of this personification is to make Carmans nature poetry into variations on the
themes of his love poetry, and thereby to unify the volume. After two nature poems and one
love poem, the first third of the book then concludes with the emblematic Seven
Things. Here Carman compares mans quest for an ideal with the urge/Of
the great worlds desire, and implies that the heart that abides to the
end will obtain its release (Carman, pp. 53-54).

It must be admitted that the
poems in the middle of the volume, including such fine lyrics as A Sea Child,
Pulvis et Umbra, and A Northern Vigil, add little or nothing to
the Wordsworthian pattern that this article is concerned to trace. Indeed, as James Cappon
argues (and despite Roberts protestations to the contrary), the chief influence on
these poems is probably Edgar Allan Poe.34 The
influences of Poe, Rossetti, and Wordsworth go some way towards accounting for the tone of
Low Tide on Grand Pré. From Poe Carman may have derived his concern with the
death of a beloved, as well as his predilection for haunting proper nouns
(Arrochar, Golden Rowan, of Menalowan  Carman, pp. 68-69).
From Rossetti he may have received an inspiration for his attempt to fuse sacred and
secular love. From Wordsworth he learned the poetic value of his panentheistic insights.
Carmans ability to fuse three such disparate influences is a credit to his own
creative intelligence, and proof that eclectic detachment was present in
Canadian poetry before A.J.M. Smith coined the phrase.

Through the
Twilight, which comes near the center of the volume, bears significant resemblances
to Low Tide on Grand Pré. Again the beloved is absent, and again the speaker
has memories of a year ago:

The red vines bar my window way;
The Autumn sleeps beside his fire,
For he has sent this fleet-foot day
A years march back to bring to me
One face whose smile is my desire,
Its light my star.
(Carman, p. 72)

With a calm faith unknown to the speaker of Low
Tide on Grand Pré, the speaker of Through the Twilight believes that
Gods hand between our hands forever/Will set no bar (Carman, p. 72). His
hope for an imminent reunion is excessive, but the poem ends with the achievement of
another form of communion:

The dark has shut your eyes from mine,But in this hush of brooding weather A gleam on twilights gathering line Has riven the barriers of dream:Soul of my soul, we are togetherAs the angels are!(Carman, p. 73)

With In Apple Time,
the Wordsworthian influence is again apparent. In a manner similar to Frosts
After Apple-Picking, which Carman could have influenced,35 In Apple Time describes an autumn harvest and then
invests it with symbolic associations. The phrase The foresters of time
(Carman, p. 89) in the opening stanza immediately raises the poem beyond the literal
level. The interlocutor in this poem may represent either a woman or a personification of
nature, or both:

Through leagues of bloom I went with Spring,To call you on the slopes of morn,Where in imperious song is borne The wild heart of the goldenwing.(Carman, p. 89)

Following the traditional associations of the seasons
with the phases of mans life, the poem moves from springs unrest to
autumns calm. The song of spring is imperious in two senses: it is both urgent and
arrogant. The speakers quest continues through alien summer lands to
find its consummation in autumn: To-day, where russet shadows are,/I hold your face
between my hands (Carman p. 90). He regards this communion as the completion of his
youthful longings: Remembrance and desire, undone,/From old regret to dreams
return (Carman, p. 90). These lines bear an important relation to the ninth stanza
of Low Tide on Grand Pré, in which the speaker remembers that all
desire and all regret,/And fear and memory, were naught (Carman, p. 18). There the
speaker wishes to abolish linear time and his familiar ego. In the later poem,
the speakers dream enables him to retrieve his memories, and so to accept the
exigencies of time. The last stanza contains a Wordsworthian consolation:

The apple harvest time is here,
The tender apple harvest time;
A sheltering calm, unknown at prime,
Settles upon the brooding year.
(Carman, p. 90)

Prime can denote the day, spring, youth, and
a specific religious service. Similarly, the brooding calm suggests twilight,
autumn, maturity, and the presence of grace. Carmans last stanza is analogous to the
conclusion of Wordsworths Immortality Ode, which speaks of how The
Clouds that gather round the setting sun/Do take a sober colouring from an eye/That hath
kept watch oer mans mortality (Wordsworth, 11. 197-99). Having gradually
gained a faith that looks through death,/In years that bring the philosophic
mind (Wordsworth, 11. 186-87), both poets are able to conceive of the temporal world
as a vale of soul-making.

Five of the remaining six poems
in the book are songs of vagabondia, expressions of Carmans preference
for the freedom of the open road over the comforts of domesticity. As such, these poems
could not have occurred earlier in the volume without disrupting the elegiac mood of the
earlier poems. After In Apple Time, in which Carman comes to regard experience
as formative, the vagabondia poems confirm and amplify his joyous acceptance of the
natural world: The world is Vagabondia/To him who is a vagabond (Carman, p.
125). In the rather prolix Wanderer, the tidal image of Low Tide on
Grand Pré returns, but with a difference:

Then when the tide of all being and beauty
Ebbs to the utmost before the first dawn,
Comes the still voice of the morrow revealing
Inscrutable valorous hope  and is gone.
(Carman,
p. 99)

Here the ebb and flow are recognized as the inevitable
rhythm of life. Now the transience of mortal things is accepted and placed within a
religious orientation. Now the one hope is that the dream of the heart
will endure by-and-by (Carman, p. 100). In Wayfaring, Carman revealingly
lists Chaucer, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare as his predecessors in the
company of the ancient mother, and as his fellow interpreters of natures
old secret (Carman, pp. 109-11).36
In The End of the Trail, the very title of which moves the volume toward its
conclusion, the speaker finds traces of his beloved in the beauties of nature:

The swirling tide, the lonely gulls,
The sweet low wood-winds that rejoice 
No sound nor echo of the sea
But hath tradition of your voice.
(Carman, p. 117)

He is able to wait patiently for his eventual reunion
with his beloved, sometime ere the long night (Carman, p. 122).
Whither, the wistful concluding poem, completes the volume by returning to the
theme of romantic separation. As its last stanza states, the lovers are not to be reunited
in this world:

Thou with the morrows sun
Hillward and free,
I to the vast and hoar
Lone of the sea.
(Carman, p. 132)

By now, however, Carmans religious ideals have
been well-established. The lovers look forward to their eventual reunion, When the
wind . . . Into the long ago/Lures [them] away (Carman, p. 131). Without abandoning
the idealism advanced in previous poems in the book, Carman humanizes it by blending it
with the melancholia that so distinguishes Low Tide on Grand Pré.

III

In Low Tide on Grand Pré, Carman demonstrated
an ability to respond to various nineteenth-century poetic traditions in a resourceful and
intelligent manner, and to arrange his lyrics in a well-wrought volume showing multeity in
unity. Several of his later volumes, notably Behind the Arras, By the Aurelian Wall,
Sappho, and Sanctuary, might profit from an examination along similar lines
to those advanced in this article. If so, it would no longer be possible to dismiss Carman
as a derivative writer, although it would be necessary to discriminate his
successful poems from his failures. A proper recognition of his nineteenth-century
contexts can enhance our appreciation of Carman, and of his Confederation peers. In short,
I am suggesting that Confederation poetry be given the respect that is customarily
accorded the poetry of the McGill movement. Such a critical approach might succeed in
removing the pervasive but dubious anti-Romantic tenets of Canadian modernism, tenets that
have lingered here long after they have been questioned elsewhere. It would be remiss to
conclude without noting that A.J.M. Smith came to recognize the need for such an approach
to the Confederation poets: They had not read Hulme or Eliot or Dylan Thomas,
Smith ironically argues, but we must not condemn them entirely for having read
Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, or Matthew Arnold  as most of them, and I think
fruitfully, had.37 Canadian
literature will be truly mature only when it accepts its own past.

Notes

I am grateful to D.M.R. Bentley and R.M. Stingle for their comments on
an earlier version of this paper.

Low Tide on Grand Pré: A Book of Lyrics, 3rd ed.
(Boston and New York: Lamson, Wolffe, and Company, 1895), p. 9. Except for the addition
ofMarian Drury, Golden Rowan, and A Sea Drift, this
edition follows the order of the first edition. Subsequent citations from this volume will
be given in the text after the designation Carman. [back]

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood, Poems, Volume I, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1977), p. 524, 1. 5. Subsequent citations from this volume will be given in the text after
the designation Wordsworth.[back]

Erroneously printed as Although in the New Canadian
Library edition.[back]

Brown finds a unity of approach residing in mans
moods and feelings as revealed and interpreted by various aspects of nature;
Bliss Carmans Latest Book of Poems, rev. of Behind the Arras: A Book
of the Unseen, The Canadian Magazine, VI, No. 5 (March 1896), 478. Scotts
comment is cited in note 32. [back]

A Decade of Canadian Poetry, rpt. from The
Canadian Magazine (1901) in Twentieth-Century Essays on Confederation Literature,
ed. and introd. Lorraine McMullen (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1976), p. 115. The phrase in
quotation marks is from Shelleys To a Skylark.[back]

Eclectic Detachment: Aspects of Identity in Canadian
Poetry, rpt. from Canadian Literature (1961) in his Towards a View of
Canadian Letters: Selected Critical Essays 1928-1971 (Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 1973), p. 26. [back]